Self‐Portrait with Burned Weapon: The Wound That Does Not Heal

Setting aside organic metaphors of growth and maturation, architect and author Mark Dorrian addresses the ‘early work’ by attending to Lebbeus Woods's descriptively yet evocatively named Black Notebooks. Turning his mind's eye to the Notebooks as a record of the interior struggles of their author – as spiritual diaries – he takes on the symbolism of the wound that must be suffered, and finds much that sheds light on the younger Woods and on his lasting ambitions for architecture.